“UC will be a business communication suite which integrates convergence, interoperability, security and dependability with collaboration. Collaborative suites will be enhanced to deliver business outcomes, as this would be the key consideration of CXOs prior to deploying any communication suite,” said Harsh Upadhyay, industry analyst for ICT, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific.

UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions are growing at an unprecedented rate. While large enterprises are choosing the hybrid UC deployment model, the mid-market space has opened up as a green-field for UC vendors and service providers.

Telecom service providers such as Telstra, British Telecom, Verizon, Orange and others already have their UCaaS offerings in the market. Large system integrators such as Dimension Data, DTSI are also pushing themselves into this market.

Organizations have started deploying analytics engines to utilize growing data. They will derive benefits from their contact centers. Contact center prescribes action items for most of the functions within a business, ensuring better customer experience.

Social media is gaining traction as a contact center channel, and it is expected to become a channel as important as the phone by 2018. Analytics that run on top of social media platforms can help organizations build that extra edge which helps them in delivering superior customer experience, deriving deep consumer insights, and reducing customer churn.

Frost & Sullivan expects 80 billion connected devices by the end of 2020. Multiple functions within the organization- remote maintenance, process optimization, intelligent branches and many others- all require UC solutions at the backend.

A need across the various working profiles will push UC solutions to be available on all devices as apps.